shahine.com/omar/

Scoble recently wrote about Onfolio, which is essentially “Favorites on steroids” as he says. Well the favorites feature in IE pretty useless so anything is better. Kudos to the folks who made Onfolio though because the UI is very polished, something you don't see to often (nice 32 bit icons, good use of standard HI controls, fonts, elements etc).

Onfolio reminds me a lot of a feature we have in Mac Internet Explorer; The Scrapbook. Scrapbook was essentially a way to take a snapshot of a web page, and save it off for the user in their Explorer Bar like feature (we called it something else). Anyway, the feature was great because you could quickly and easily capture things like order confirmations and so on. Onfolio seems to extend that metaphor and adds a whole bunch of useful functionality, like better categorization, sharing, adding personal notes. However, as a person who uses more than one Computer I find it a deal breaker that there isn’t any kind of roaming story, or way to persist my saved stuff across multiple machines. Joe Cheng kindly left a comment in Scoble's post that indicates that since the data is just stored as .cfs files in theory they could be roamed. I use a feature called Intellimirror, or Roaming My Documents (part of Windows 2000 and XP) to keep the Windows My Documents folder the same across all my Microsoft PCees, so I'll have to find a way to get Onfolio to store the files there (which is where my IE Favorites are stored).

Interestingly enough Scrapbook, is one of my two favorite MacIE feature to make it over to Windows. Forms Autofill was another feature we created to help users populate web forms with some stored information. Google brings that to us with the Google Toolbar.

And this all brings me to something I was complaining to my manager about the other day. Why did we just all of a sudden decide to stop innovating in the browser space? I mean it’s still in the top 2 things that people do on the Internet. Do we feel that IE is perfect and that further innovation is no longer warranted? Is it because it’s the dominant browser, end of story? Well we have other products that are market leaders and we still pour R&D into them. Well, it’s more than likely that it’s because it generates no direct revenue. However, it’s a part of Windows and that generates a lot of revenue. I’m personally upset that nothing is being done to enhance my productivity when browsing the web. Right now it’s atrocious, with all the windows that I can never track down, the annoying disappearing status bar, the CSS bugs etc. I’ve used Avant Browser and Firefox, but still find myself coming back to IE because it’s the default, and it’s there.

I wonder how much longer before my PC caves in because of all the add-ins, enhancements and other software I have that extends IE, Outlook, XP etc . I can just hear my co-workers reminding me of how many extensions and hacks I use to have on my Classic Mac OS machines...

So, here I am in Boston. I flew here for some customer visits we are going to do as part of an overall planning and research project. When we landed, my watch beeped and automatically showed the local time. In addition, it automatically got the local weather feed. Small things like this really make me happy. The nice thing about getting the weather this way is that I'll probably not be in Boston for another few years, so going to the trouble of setting up SMS alerts or checking some website (pull technology) just becomes unnecessary.

Now, seeing as I'm here for 2 nights it would be extra cool if I could find out info on nearby restaurants, local movie times and even traffic for driving back to the airport. However, I don't thing the traffic thing will help me since I've already gotten hopelessly lost getting to the hotel. The signs around her just suck. Now I remember what it's like driving in the northeast. Look there is the exit sign for so and so. Oh too late I missed it. Now I must wait in 15 min of traffic to correct this mistake.

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=1620&e=2&u=/sv/uscarstopeuropeaninreliability

Sheesh, no kidding. My 2002 Audi A4 was/is full of minor bugs. For example, my car remembers the side view mirror position for each driver based in the key used to unlock the car. However, the mirrors move randomly each time the doors are opened and for no reason. Audi of course doesn't know this is a problem and my dealer can't do anything about it since it's too much of a “software” problem. In fact, most times that I've complained of problems with my car they were written off as software glitches and well, Audi doesn't have Service Packs for their cars I guess.

The Sopranos in HD is just awesome.

For the past few weeks I've been working on support for the Front Panel Display that my custom build Media Center has. For about a year it was dark (not doing anything). But a few weeks ago, I got hold of some code from Ian Kennedy to talk to the display using C# and managed code. I also got hold of some sample code on how to write a Media Center Sink using managed code (you need to expose the class library as a COM object). All of this is documented in the Media Center 2004 SDK but all the code and related samples are in C++ (not something I care to know anything about, ever).

For me this was a great programming exercise. I wrote an Interface (allowing others to write plugins for their particular Front Panel Display), code to handle dynamic loading of assemblies, a state machine for aggregating Media Center State, Installer code for doing the COM registration using (non trivial for me), an MSI for doing all the right magic, and of course figuring out how to expose a C# class library as a COM object.

Would people be interested in having a look at this stuff? Is there anyone out there that is running Media Center and wants to write their own custom Front Panel Display? If so I might figure out a way to release this code.

Here is the result of the work I did. You can see that we are in a My Music session, playing Train Wreck from the latest Sarah McLachlan CD.

I've been using Resharper for a few weeks now and I'm impressed with the productivity gains I've experienced in Visual Studio. They continue to make bug fixes and feature enhancements on a regular basis. It's free to try the evaluation for now and I'm definitely going to buy it when it's released.

My favorite features are:

1. Better syntax checking (akin to VB.NET) for C#. You don't need to compile before finding out you have errors
2. Better code highlighting and code formatting
3. Simple refactoring support (rename) which I do all the time.

Lets talk about my inbox for a second. I never let it get over 200 messages, but it's never under 100 messages. I literally struggle every day to keep this thing from exploding. I have dozens? hundreds? of folders and I think the max number of server side rules that exchange will let me and I still can't deal. When I first started at Microsoft it was under 30 each day. But as my roles changed, my interests grew and my responsibility increased it's simply impossible for me to get back to this. When we shipped Virtual PC 6.1 I managed to get my inbox down to 4 messages, but a week later it was back to 150.

Robert Scoble mentioned a David Allen Seminar today and that got me intrigued. I'm not sure where he took it but I think I really need something like this. I went to his web site and already read this document that talks about e-mail tips, and then there is his book, a downloadable “paper” on using Outlook and finally his software that apparently implements his philosophy of e-mail management. I'm tempted to just throw down the $70 for his Outlook software cause I'm pretty much desperate at this point.

My work discipline around e-mail is so bad that it's spilled into my personal life and my “home” e-mail account is just as pathetic as my work inbox. I avoid looking at my other mailboxes because I can't even deal with my work one. I don't get any joy out of e-mail like I used to when I was new to the net.

BTW - I've always wondered. When you die, where does your e-mail go? Who answers it? Does it just stop when your don't pay your bills and your ISP shuts it down .

Lenn Pryor, who has the unique roll of being Robert Scoble's manager, recently switched to dasBlog. Jeff Sandquist, one of Robert's co-workers also switched over from Radio. He posted a nice How-To on moving from Radio Userland to dasBlog (importing posts, comments etc). It's a little known feature that dasBlog can actually move all your Radio stuff over, as well as continue to upstream your posts to your Radio site (via upstreaming service) as well as map your Radio links to dasBlog links using custom http handlers. Clemens (dasBlog papa), myself and a few others actually moved from Radio to dasBlog using some of these tools.

Some pictures of the pile of snow that engulfed my car. It took about 1 hours to dig the car out (2 people). After I got the back out, the All Wheel Drive took over and my car just powered out of the hole it was in. I love AWD + All Weather Tires. Worth every penny .

Never in my life have I seen so much snow (and I've seen my fair share). I've been up in Tahoe since Saturday, and it's snowed at least 6ft in the last 36 hours. I've been learning to snowboard (skiier all my life) and I have to say, snowboarding gets the nod over skiing. It's fantastic. Anyway, the snow is still coming down very strong. The bad news is that my wife did not fair so well. She broke her arm our second day out. Luckily, it was a good break (I didn't know there was such a thing) and should heal quickly. Tomorrow is our last day, and I'm looking forward to seeing San Francisco (although I hear the rain is horrible).

Funny enough I can get WiFi here, but no ATT service. Go figure.

Rats! As I get ready to go on a vacation this next week, my Motorolla MPX-200 smartphone just up and died on me. I had to dust off my old T68i (thank god for GSM and SIM cards, I can just swap them).

This is a real bummer though. I was planning on leaving my laptop at home and just getting by with my Smartphone for e-mail access to my MS Exchange account. Seems this isn't going to happen. I've come to depend on my smartphone in more ways than I can help at this point. It's my calendar, contacts list and lightweight e-mail device. It's also got a program called eWallet that stores all my bank financial info etc. In short, this thing is an invaluable tool. Not sure how I'll get by for a week w/o it. Luckily I can use Outlook Mobile Access (OMA) from my T68, but it's slow as molasses.